4 posts tagged with "Absurdism"

K felt like a forgotten screw in a vast machine, rusted and irrelevant. He worked in District Seventeen of the 'Integrated Information Processing Center,' responsible for verifying endless streams of data that could never truly be finished. When he dragged his exhausted body back to the white cube they called 'home,' his wife, Ella, was sitting calmly at the gleaming dining table. Before her, suspended in the air, was a soft halo of constantly shifting colors—one of the existential forms of 'Unit 734.'

K. stood in the Comprehensive Student Services Hall, clutching the crumpled receipt in his hand like a useless map. The air hung thick with a peculiar mixture of disinfectant and old paper. He needed to return a skirt—a pale lavender pleated skirt he had never intended to buy, yet which had somehow materialized in his shopping bag. It should have been a simple task, like erasing a misplaced punctuation mark, but he quickly discovered that what he was trying to erase might be an entire, incomprehensible text.

Lao Ding, Ding Jianguo, felt time slipping through his fingers—not in the metaphorical "time flies" sense, but physically disappearing. This feeling began with the third "adjusted leave" announcement of the year. That A4 sheet, printed like an official red-letter document, was like a cold surgical notice, announcing that his upcoming weekend needed to be cut, moved, and stitched together in exchange for a distant and fragmented "mini-holiday."

K. felt it necessary to go to the police station. This wasn't out of anger or revenge, although she had every reason to be angry—the man who claimed to be single, with whom she had been involved for nearly a year, the gentle and well-spoken Mr. Z, turned out to be already married. She discovered this purely by chance, as jarring as finding a hair not belonging to her on a clean floor. This isn't anger, K. told herself, it's a confirmation of order, a necessary clarification of facts. Deception is deception, just as two plus two equals four; it was a fact that needed to be recorded.